 Gentlemen, welcome back to the 17th 21 convention event here in Warsaw, Poland. Today I have the pleasure of introducing a friend of mine who I encourage Anthony to invite to this event. So without further ado, please welcome to the stage Mr. Noah Ravoy. Thank you Richard. Gentlemen, we live in a world that is designed to erode our agency. You have a problem? With your health? You take a pill? You get hungry? There's no need to think about what the future brings. You just go down and drop a couple of dollars at a McDonald's and you got food. If you're bored, we got TV shows for you to watch. Because you need a sense of purpose in your life, a video game with a hundred challenges awaits you. If you're lonely, there's no need to go out and work hard to make friends and improve yourself so that you can get good quality friends. You can just go on social media and get likes. There's no need for you to work. This is the kind of men this produces. Men who don't have agency, men who are weak because we live in a world that encourages the culture of weakness. What's the same about all of these things? The same about each of these industries is that they are selling passivity. They are selling men passivity in their lives, in their careers, and in their relationships. But passivity will not make you a successful man. They do this because they fear your agency. They fear that you can't be easily manipulated. They do this because men with agency are dangerous men. They can't be manipulated by politicians, by religious leaders, by women. They can't be coerced and controlled by strong personalities who create their cults around them. These are men that society fears. Fears because they are not sheep that can be herded. I want to help you men become men of high agency. I want you to become the men that they fear. I want you to be the man they fear. But first, we're going to talk a little bit about what agency is. Agency, we're going to have a little agenda today. I'm going to talk about what agency is, talk about its limits, and we're going to talk about some of the benefits as well as why agency is vital and especially male agency is vital to saving the West. And lastly, what specific steps you can take to develop your agency. Marcus Aurelia said that it is time that you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than all the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet. We've all probably been at some point in our life dancing like a puppet while someone else manipulated or pulled the strings. This often happens when we're younger. If you're a child, you're five years old, you don't have a lot of agency. You have to do what you're told. Ideally, your father will teach you agency. He will help you graduate from that puppet-like state into the state of being a man. Unfortunately, most men, even if they have fathers, don't have fathers that understand how to teach them agency. But what is agency? It's the red pill in action. So we all know what the red pill is. It's looking at the world the way it really is, accepting truth at any cost. But that's intellectual. What does that mean in your life? Where is that going to take you? If you have agency, you're going to take the information you learn with the red pill, the information you learn at something like the 21 convention. And you're going to present, you're going to implement that in your life in a way that will make actual changes. Every year, millions and millions of self-help books are sold. Men read them. Women read them. In fact, women buy and read more self-help books than men. But there's very little implementation of the advice they get. I want you to think a little bit about the advice you've gotten in the last couple of days and think about some of your favorite examples of things that were practically applicable in your life. What is the chance that when you go home, you're going to apply it? It's probably pretty low. It will change your attitude being here. It will change the way you think about things. But the chance of a specific advice being applied is fairly low unless, unless you tap into your agency. If you tap into your agency, you can apply 100% of what you've learned here. It will take, your ability to develop agency will take every attempt you make at self-improvement and amplify the results. So then let's take a look at what agency is and we're going to go from a simple to a complex. Agency is a sense of self-ownership. That is the understanding that you have at least some level of power and control over your thoughts, your feelings, and your emotions, and your actions. If you don't recognize that you can control yourself, you're not going to do it. The second is the actual ability to do that. These are some skills, knowledge, power over your life and willpower that is going to help you to implement what you know you want to do in your life. If you had a choice between the two of these, you always have to start with a sense of self-ownership first. There are millions of people, perhaps billions, that actually have the ability to control themselves if only they knew that they had that ability. They simply don't know how to unlock it. Kurt Doolittle gave a more systematic definition of it. He talks about it as our ability to identify opportunities. Very often, people who will not accept self-responsibility, responsibility for themselves, will talk about, well, I couldn't do this because there was no opportunity. I don't have a girl because none of them like me. I have no opportunities with women. Where I live, there's no good women. Around me, there's no good jobs. I just don't have a skill that seems to be needed, and I can't get a job. It's always about a lack of opportunities because they don't know how to identify the opportunities that exist. The other is to be able to make choices that are consistent with reality, that correspond with reality, and that are possible. You can want something. You can want it a lot, and it doesn't matter how much agency you have, how much intelligence you have. If the thing you want is actually impossible, you can't achieve it. And so aligning your goals with reality is going to help you to develop agency. And of course, the ability to act upon them, unimpeded by limitations. We'll talk about the limitations later. So you see, agency is very important. It's very powerful. Agency is a thing that makes this event possible. It's a thing that makes civilization possible. It's what separates us from the animals. Animals do most of the things we do. They're born, they eat, they have sex, they reproduce, they fight for territory, but they don't have agency. We could be just like an animal if those are all the things we limit our actions to, or if we do those things purely out of instinct. But men of agency, they have something else. They have the ability to consistently make good decisions and then act upon them to execute their will in the universe. Now, agency has limits. Man's got to know his limits. You have limits, physical limits, intellectual limits, limits in time and space. And to understand the limits to agency actually gives you more agency. Part of living in the world that seeks passivity is the idea that everything is possible or anything is possible. Of course, that's only true within the realm of reality. But the part of the passivity is to keep us focused on the unreality. But limits to agency, these are very important to understand. Does anyone know who this is? This is a famous figure. Yeah, this is Atlas. He was a titan, so kind of a god, not quite what came before the gods. And he's here holding up the world. This is what men do. Men hold up the world. It's our labor. It's our hard intellectual work that keeps the machine of society working. We are the ones that build the sewer systems, that fight the wars, that protect and provide for civilization. And it takes a lot of agency to hold up that weight for men. We have to do that within our limitations, though. So the limitations here, knowledge limitation, ignorance. If your knowledge is limited, your agency will be limited, intellectual limitation. There's a limit to how smart everyone is. And if we learn to work within our limits, we have more agency. Mindfulness limitation, that's something you can do something about. You can meditate. You can learn to get your impulses under control. Physical limitations, such as our body. You can want to be something you're not. You could say, I wish I was taller. It's not going to happen, no matter how much agency you have, because you have a limitation. We have instrumental limitations. Our ancestors didn't have the technology we have today. And so they died of diseases which today are easily preventable. If your child dies because you didn't give it a vaccination, today you'd be considered irresponsible. 300 years ago, that's just what happened. And so improvements in technology enable us to be more, to demonstrate higher levels of agency. Paradoxically, they also have been encouraging us not to display our agency. We have resource limitations. If you're poor, you're not going to be able to have the same agency as if you're rich. The reason being is your options, your possibilities are more limited. This doesn't mean that you can't show agency, but it means you're going to have to do it within your limitations. Lastly are the impediments placed upon you by others. And this is perhaps the most insidious one. And those limitations, perhaps, for example, a slave does not have the same level, the ability to demonstrate agency that a free man would have. A person living in a dictatorial government, especially through several generations where society itself has adapted to that, is going to have a hard time showing agency. And we will see this in countries where there was a lot of repressive governments for generations. It's more difficult for people to demonstrate agency. Their ability at a cultural level to be agents of their own desire or their own will are greatly reduced. And of course, you have your personality. This goes back to some extent to the physical limitations since genetics probably are responsible for about 80% of our personality. The reality is if you're a highly conscientious person, you probably already have developed agency because you will feel impelled to do it, and you'll be incredibly uncomfortable until you achieve a fairly high level of agency. On the other hand, if you're a low conscientiousness person, it's going to be very difficult for you to do the work necessary to develop agency. The thing of it like this, there are different body types. We have mesomorphs. We have ectomorphs. And these different people, mesomorphs, they find it very easy to gain muscle. Ectomorphs, easy to gain fat. If you know your personality, if you know your body type, you can train according to what you have gifted naturally, to what your natural genetics are. So it's important for us to understand our personality. Some people might recognize this from Jordan Peterson's work. And it is important. One of the great contributions he gave is making people more aware of differences in personality and how they affect the strategies that you need for your life. Again, one of the other ones I'd like to mention is neuroticism. If you're high in neuroticism, it will be difficult for you to exercise control over your negative emotions. If you're low in neuroticism, you might end up taking on tasks that are too big for you that are impossible to finish because you don't have that little warning in your brain that says, no, not that. It's too dangerous. So understanding your personality and where you are on the personality scale is going to help you to overcome the limitations of personality. Measuring agency. How do you measure something like agency? We have a pretty good measurement for IQ. But we have no way to measure agency outside of direct competition. This is why agency is so much connected with the male realm since we are competitors. All men are competitors. We compete with each other fiercely. We can compare it, but it does exist on multiple bell curves. So a lot of people talk about so-and-so hazard does not have agency. The problem with that is it doesn't recognize that there is a bell curve of agency. And if you think about it, it makes sense when you're a child, you have no agency. And as you get to be a little older, perhaps a teenager, you've developed a certain level of agency. I have a five-year-old son. And he has enough agency to understand that if he has access to unlimited sweets and he eats them, he'll get sick. And he has self-regulated his own consumption of cookies and junk food and chocolate using that information that he gained, that knowledge, and several practical experiences of me allowing him to eat too much junk food specifically so he could get that feeling of what the consequences are. But it's very hard to measure agency. There's no real way. We can't compete or we can't compare people directly. Here's a good question. Who has more agency? Donald Trump, a Navy CL team leader, or an 1840s pioneer with 10 kids? How do you compare these three people? Each of them are highly successful in the area that they have chosen. They have to have a lot of agency to get where they are. They have to have control over their thoughts, their emotions, their actions. But we can't really compare them because they're not directly competing. This is why we're not going to do a lot of comparisons between individuals with agency, but rather, we'll compare ourselves with our past selves. What's some of the low agency behavior? One of the most common low agency behaviors is hero worship. And we see this a lot. We see people that we have our own cases in the Manisphere of hero worship, but we see this everywhere. My politician gets in, that's going to solve all my problems. My guy gets in, he's going to solve all my problems. All I need to do is get on that guy's team and everything will be great. The hero worship is an attempt by individuals to delegate their agency to someone else. That's what hero worship is. Instead of taking personal responsibility for our problems, we decide to let someone else be responsible for them. You do that, you become invested in that person's success, and it doesn't matter what they do, you've become, as Ivan Throne said, insorceled by them, and you're unable to break free from that. Hero worship is a very dangerous low agency behavior. Unregulated emotions. Normally, when we say unregulated emotions, we're thinking of women, but we will also see that often in men. And how do we view a man who can't regulate his emotions, who can't control himself? We'll see him as being unmasculine, untrustable. Yeah, in weak, exactly, weak. And right now, we get a lot of encouragement. Just do whatever feels good. You control your emotions as toxic masculinity, they say. But we understand, instinctively, as men, that a man who can't control himself, who can't control his emotions, is a man who doesn't have agency, who can't be trusted. Flakiness and weakness, you show up to the place as you promised to be at the time you promised to be there. Do you make demands of friends and then not follow through on your half? When I say weakness, I don't mean specifically physical weakness. I'm talking about weakness of character, weakness of personality. Are we unwilling to face discomfort in order to accomplish the things that we want to accomplish? And the slave devices. So I mentioned before that a slave does not have the same agency as a free man. That sounds like a funny thing to say, considering modern days we don't really have slaves in first world countries. Actually, we have a lot of slaves. You see them in the news, hunched over, a needle in their arm. Or you see people, slaves to debt, slaves to education, spending almost their entire life going to school, going back over and over again. There's a lot of people are slaves to social welfare programs. If those programs collapse, those people have no way to survive. They literally depend on the welfare plantation. These people demonstrate low agency. What are high agency behaviors? Well, you're going to have your masculine qualities fully developed. And I don't need to talk much about those. Those are the ones that Jack Donovan spoke about earlier. So the strength, courage, mastery, and honor. If you have high agency, you will recognize the value of developing those characteristics in yourself. The man of high agency knows himself well. He has to understand his own personality and his own inclinations in order to have control over them. A lot of people think about there's an example of an elephant and a rider. And it's used to give an illustration of what it's like to control your own mind, your subconscious. And you're like the little tiny guy up on top of the elephant. And you're trying to control this elephant. And the reality is the elephant doesn't have to listen to you. And if the rider doesn't understand the psychology of elephants and have a relationship with that elephant, he can't control it. The elephant will do whatever it wants. When you're attempting to control your own life and your own self and your own inclinations, you need to understand them and have a relationship with yourself that allows you to take control. The high agency man takes radical personal responsibility, 100% responsibility. He's in the situation he's in right now because of choices that he made. It's a little hard to accept sometimes. Because very often, we are suffering pain that other people caused us. Very often, we're suffering pain from our childhood all the way into our adulthood. How are we responsible for that? Doesn't matter. If we don't accept responsibility for our current state, we'll never get out of it. Blaming the other people, even if they are responsible and we acknowledge that they have responsibility, is not going to help us to develop the agency to deal with the results of what we've been given. We don't have control over what our governments do. We don't have control over what feminists do, or women in general. We can't control them. We can't manipulate them. But we can take personal responsibility for everything that we are doing, for our reaction to those situations. The high agency man is going to be successful in life. This picture is not the only success that men can have. This is one option. Wife and kids. There's other ways you can choose to be successful. Agency doesn't tell you the destination. It tells you how to walk the road, whatever the road is for you. Does anyone have any questions about what agency is or how important it is? That's a good question. Agency is very much connected with sovereignty. Agency is at the personal level. Sovereignty is at the group level. You cannot maintain sovereignty without a strong group because you cannot compete with other groups. As an individual, you can't compete with another group. It doesn't matter how good you are. One man against three, the one man will always lose. So sovereignty requires you to join up with a group. Why do smart people do stupid things? Well, we know why stupid people do stupid things. It's because they're stupid. They can't help it. But why do smart people do stupid things? You know, we probably all have known someone in our life, someone who is self-destructive, someone who has lots of potential but they're unable to reach that potential. You know, they get a good job, they do something to make sure they get fired. They get into a relationship, they sabotage it. Why are they doing that? I mean, they're smart. It's because intelligence isn't enough. Intelligence is not enough to be successful in life. It's a good start, who wouldn't want to be more intelligent. But you also need to have agency. You can think of it like this, intelligence, if it was the engine of a car, an agency is the transmission. It allows you to take that potential, that power that you have and transmit it to the road and actually get traction and actually do something with your life. How has agency developed? Does anyone here play an instrument? Anyone play guitar or anything like that? When do you think you started learning that instrument, the initial skills? Probably you think, well, maybe I started learning when I was a teenager or a kid. The reality is, you start learning how to play the instrument before you're born. The early subroutines that allow you to grasp the instrument are actually being written into your brain while you're still in your mother's womb. You're learning to grasp, you grasp your umbilical cord, you grasp your hand, you grasp your feet, you pull on your ears, you're learning to manipulate your environment. When you're born, you're going to learn to listen, you're going to learn to see, you're going to start building up all of these skills and subroutines and eventually you're going to get to a point where someone will hand you a guitar and you understand how to pick up that guitar. You don't need to think about it a lot. You don't need to think about like, how exactly do I move all five of my fingers in unison? Because subconsciously, you have programmed yourself sufficiently that basic tasks are now automatic. And you're going to learn how to strum the guitar, how to pick it, you're going to learn how to coordinate different notes together to make music, you're going to understand about music theory and eventually you'll get to a very high level. Perhaps you become a performer and you learn about stage craft, you learn how to entertain people. But what happens, if something in your early programming went wrong, if something in the early programming of you learning to play a guitar went wrong and you're unable to correctly identify how to understand the world around you, you'll probably give up. You'll probably never learn to play a guitar. And this is exactly the way you learn to play guitar is the same way you learn to construct your entire personality. You have your hardware, that's your genetic predispositions. By hardware, I don't mean your physical body, it's more your DNA, what's written into you. You can do a lot with your body, depending on how you eat and depending on your environment, your body will change a lot. But your genetic predispositions, those don't change, you inherit them from birth. You have software, that is your learned behavior, you have a systematic operating system that society gives you. You were raised in Italy, you were raised in Poland, you were raised in Portugal, you were raised in a church or not in a church, you're gonna get a different operating system. And on top of that operating system, will be run thousands and thousands of smaller programs that help you decide what to do each morning when you wake up. You don't have to think about when you wake up, okay, what do I have to do now? You just wake up and you make your breakfast, you do your life. And these things become extremely automatic if they're programmed into us. And we of course function within a system, within a limits to our environment. If you're born in one part of the world, you may have a different set of limitations than if you're born in another part. If you're born to a wealthy family, or a broken family, or an abusive family, you're gonna have to function within that system as a child. Your system will change when you leave home. Now you're on your own, you have a different system. And you get married, you have another system. And you have kids and the system changes again. The structure around you changes and you have to adapt to it. But what happens if in the early part of our personality development, we end up with some maladaptive or corrupted subroutines? What if some of the ways that we approach life have been at the very base written improperly? Or worse, what if we got a mind virus like feminism? You'd say, oh, nobody here would have feminist ideas or feminist mind virus. And yes, you may have, on the top of your mind, when you're conscious, overwritten that with new programming, but you might still be operating under some sort of a mind virus. When you're operating under a mind virus, it will prevent you from having agency in the area that that mind virus touches. And the earlier the programming was written, the more areas of your life it will affect. Very common one is that people have an inability to face confrontation. And this is because early on in their life, they had a confrontation with their parents where they said, I don't think that's fair. And their parents said, shut up, stupid. You're gonna do what I tell you to do because I'm bigger than you and stronger than you. And I can make you do it. Kids says, what's going on? Oh my goodness, a confrontation. My parents are my life. For children, parents are life and death. And the children say, confrontation could get me killed. I can't make a confrontation with people. And then I'm talking to them in their 30s. And they're still operating under that base programming that they got when they were five years old. They're still operating on it at 35 years old and they can't make confrontations with their workmates. They allow women to push them around because they can't tell them no. They allow their boss to push them around because they have some programming deep down inside which isn't working. Agency is really, really important. If we have maladaptive programming, we're not gonna be able to exercise our agency. It's important because only male agency is gonna save the West. We're living in a society where millions of men, tens of millions of men have poorly written programming. They do not understand how to control their emotions. They don't understand how to confront people. Why do you think we can't keep borders on our countries? Why do you think we can't address crime waves? Why do you think we can't address the bad behavior of women? Because somewhere along the line, we were programmed not to question mom's authority or we were programmed that we have to share our stuff with everybody and therefore socialism makes sense. Or we were programmed that we're not allowed to criticize anyone and therefore we can't say no, no matter how much of an infraction it is against us. Somewhere along the line, we got programmed with something that wasn't working right. I put a lot of work pressure on men. I said, men build the world. Men have to maintain it and protect it. What about women? Do they have any responsibility? Do women have any agency? Who here wishes women took more personal responsibility for themselves? Yeah, yeah. Shout it out so you can be heard on camera. Yeah, yeah. We wish, don't we? Who wishes that women would vote in a more responsible manner instead of for bigger and bigger states? Shout it out so we hear it on camera. Yeah, yeah. Who wishes that women would act honorably and fairly in divorce courts and not try to divorce rape men and steal their children? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We wish, we wish. You think it's gonna happen in the very near future? Widespread that women will suddenly say, we have to have agency and wake up? No. No. You know, us wishing that is fine but us believing that it's actually possible, that's low agency behavior. We're believing in fantasies. This is because women are designed for children. Women, everything about them is designed to make them good mothers. This is their area of agency. This is where they are capable of showing high levels of agency in the care of little children. My wife is at home right now. She's pregnant, she's got twins and she's looking after my five-year-old son. That takes a lot of agency. She's gotta be back and forth to the hospital. Twins are more tricky than singletons. She's looking after the other one. She's taking care of the house. She's feeding them. I don't have any worry that everything at home is running well because I know my wife has agency for those things. Those other things I mentioned, voting, the personal responsibility in divorce courts, these type of things, women were never designed to have to face those kind of questions. But in society today, we have given women choices to which they have no answer. We have given them possibilities and options which they didn't want. When women first given the vote, very few women voted. Most women thought it was ridiculous that women were given the vote. They had no interest in voting. They weren't interested in politics. They were interested in their families. Now of course, when you offer somebody free cheese, you're going to attract a lot of people. You're gonna attract a lot of mice. So as the government started offering more and more free things in exchange for votes, more and more women started voting. But this is the realm where women have high agency where they're able to act and have control. But how do we get back to a system where women are able to exercise their agency primarily in their domains? It's only gonna work if we have a lot of high agency patriarchs. Now patriarch, you assume father, this means men. This means men who make, and a patriarchy is an organization who make an organization of men who are organized, who are networked and who work together to protect women and children and other men. We need this more than ever because it's only the male agency that will help us save the West who will help us undo the damage that's been done especially 50 years in the West. We're the only ones that have the capacity to do that. So then how do we develop agency? It's kind of like developing muscles. So you can exercise, you can get strong, but if you stop working out for a while you're gonna get weak again. It's something you have to implement into your regular schedule. You can't say I've developed agency and now that I'm here, I don't have to do anything else. I've developed as far as I need to develop. I'm okay. I'm all grown up now. With agency we have the capacity to continue to climb higher and higher as we get older. There was a time in history when the elder men of the tribe, they weren't able to hunt anymore. They couldn't fish, they couldn't fight, but they still had the respect of the younger men of the tribe because they had worked their entire life to develop their agency and they had the ability to pass on that wisdom to younger men. What are some of the practical steps we can take for developing agency? And here's where you guys should take some notes. You have to make three acknowledgements. If you can't make these acknowledgements you can't have agency because these are the basics of developing agency. One, I acknowledge that I can exercise some level of control over my thoughts and feelings. Something, you gotta be able to exercise something to get started. I acknowledge that I'm responsible to control my thoughts, feelings, and actions to the best of my ability within my natural limits. Those are the limits we mentioned earlier. Third, I acknowledge that I must put in the work to develop the mental and physical fortitude to exercise my agency. You're taking 100% responsibility for yourself and that's what this means. If you wanna say 100% responsibility, what do you mean? You mean these three things. This is the intellectual admission of agency but you need to get this down into your heart as well. We often talk about men in emotions and we say, oh, you know, we're very rational and we are, we tend to be more rational but we need to also understand that men are motivated to act largely based on emotions. That could be desire, desire is an emotion. We want something, we desire it. We like someone, that's an emotion. Emotions are very powerful. We need to get our emotions in line with this. We need to desire this ability to have agency. We need to crave it, have a hunger for it. When we do that, it'll go beyond being an intellectual exercise and it'll become something that is a part of us. Then you gotta take some actions, yeah? First it starts up here but then it has to do something. We have to strengthen our mind via meditation that will help us to learn how to sustain our willpower enough to exercise our agency in the real world. Here I'm gonna say something that might be a little controversial. Who here has experience with Asian style meditation? Who here has experience with Western style meditation? Oh wow, someone with, good, it's good. Most, normally if you go into a room, most people that have had, most people have had more experience with Asian style meditation than Western style. And the big difference is that Asian style meditation is designed to empty your mind, it's designed to make you comfortable with the situation the way it is and it's designed to help you be led. It actually lowers your agency in some cases. Now most people that are Westerners that are doing Asian meditation have actually mutated it to be almost Western meditation. An example, Asian meditation, think about nothing. Well, if you're in a terrible situation and you're trying to survive it, sounds great. If you've got an oppressive government and you don't want the cognitive dissonance of dealing with it, empty your mind. Western meditation's different. It's a meditation of conquerors. It's a meditation of men. It is a meditation where we think about a subject, an objective, and we think deeply about that until we have come up with a solution. It requires us to strengthen our mind to solve problems and to not accept things the way they are if we can possibly change them. That's the meditation of Western men. We want to develop the self-knowledge to understand the current state of our programming and our tendencies and limitations. I have specific training about that. We're using the meditation techniques, Western meditation techniques. You delve deep into your mind and you look at how you are programmed and you can trace that all the way back. Very often people find they can trace it back to specific instances in their childhood. I had a client recently and whenever she would have an argument with her boyfriend or fiance actually, whenever she'd have an argument with her fiance, even a discussion, not quite an argument, her entire brain would shut down. She'd get this rush of cortisol, she'd shut down and she'd go into fight or flight mode and these were relatively unimportant things. We were able to trace it back to her childhood when her father would harshly criticize her in front of guests until the point where she was broken down and crying. And so she saw any kind of confrontation with a loved one especially a loved dominant male in your life as ultimately an emotionally destroying experience. And so when she went into a confrontation and if you have a relationship it's basically about solving a series of confrontations as you get closer and closer aligned with the other person and those confrontations shouldn't be a bad thing. They should be, well, what do you think about this and what do I think and let's come to a path that we can both walk. But for her it was a win-lose situation, not a win-win situation because of her programming. God developed the self knowledge to know where your programming is and what you can do to change it. Then you have to learn how to reprogram yourself. This is dangerous stuff. This is dangerous because you can reprogram yourself wrong. I highly suggest doing this with some help. You can reprogram yourself in a way that gets you in a lot of trouble or waste a lot of time. We learned earlier about someone you reprogrammed. One of the earlier speakers talked about he programmed himself using a book of pickup artistry and he wasted like three years trying to implement it unsuccessfully. He didn't know it at the time but he made some bad reprogramming to himself. This process of reprogramming doesn't end with your attempt to reprogram yourself the first time. The programming that I'm running on now, the operating system I'm running on works well for me as a married man with a kid. I got two more coming. I'm gonna have to change how I organize my life, how I react to things, how I delegate responsibilities. When my situation changes, I need to update the program. Very powerful to be able to reprogram yourself at will. You also wanna avoid anything that's gonna stop you from developing agency or a roger agency. We talked about that in the beginning. We live in a world that's designed to erode your agency, designed to keep you weak. You wanna make sure you avoid any bad association. You got friends with low agency, you got friends that they can't seem to get any traction in life on anything. If you can't help them to join you on your agency path, you may have to limit your association with them. So we usually think of association as face to face contact or maybe on social media. What happens if you watch a movie about men behaving badly, doing stupid things, acting like low agency men? Well, you spend two hours basically associating with those people. It's a one-way association. They don't pick anything up from us except whatever we paid for the movie. But we pick up from them their attitudes and behaviors. We become more like them. Be very, very careful about that. That's why we have to avoid this demoralizing entertainment. If you're trying to get agency or self-control over yourself in a specific area, watching entertainment which programs you and trains you to believe the opposite is counterproductive to your goals. If you have a problem standing up to women, do you think it makes sense to watch a movie where a 100-pound woman beats up a 250-pound man for two hours straight? Basically, your modern superhero movie? How's that going to help program your mind to be able to talk to women as a man when what you've seen is a fantasy? Avoid this demoralizing entertainment and the negative self-talk that often comes with it. We'll see something, we'll see a fantasy in entertainment and we'll think that we can replicate it in our own life and when we can't, we'll tell ourselves, well, I'm not good enough. Everyone is involved in some negative self-talk at some point in their life. That negative self-talk doesn't come from nothing. Very often, that's part of your programming. At some point in your life, someone told you you were no good, that you were never gonna succeed, that you had no value, and that you were unlovable. And they told you that enough times, it gets programmed into your mind. And even though consciously you know it's not true, it's programmed at a deeper level, it's down in the sub-routines. If you don't dig that out, you're never gonna get over the negative self-talk and you'll think it comes from you, but it's the voice, maybe it's the voice of your dad, maybe it's the voice of your mom or your school teacher. Now, schools are notorious for this. Who here has had during their education a bad teacher, a teacher that was more destructive than helpful? Noise is please, because they can't hear it from there. Yeah, they can't see it on the camera. Yeah, everybody has a teacher like that. Those teachers can undo the good that 10 good teachers do. They can program deficiencies into your mind since the whole point of school is programming and indoctrinating people. Gotta dig that out. Dig out that negative self-talk wherever it came from. So then, you've done all of this. You're working on developing your agency. What's the point of doing it? You're gonna get benefits, direct benefits to your life. The first benefit is you're gonna stop doing stupid self-sabotaging things. Who here has at some point in their life sabotaged themselves? I have. Oh yeah, yeah, noises, cause they can't hear. Yeah, yeah. Everybody has sabotaged themselves at some point. Everybody's done something stupid. That's one thing to do it occasionally. If this is a habit, that's programming. It's not an accident. We're doing it repeatedly. We're doing it because there's something wrong in how we're approaching our life. We're gonna get better regulated emotions. So occasionally, people come to me and they say, I have anger issues. I get really angry for no reason. I can't figure it out. Things that should be minor piss me off to the point I wanna literally kill somebody. And when I talk to them about this, there's always something deep down inside where their programming is defective in some way. They don't have the control over their emotions. And they may never commit an act of violence because of this anger, not an act externally. Well, what's happening with all that anger? Where is it going? If it's not going externally, they're turning it inside. They're still suffering from it. Well-regulated emotions. The other thing is, I mentioned this before, we often talk about men and say, oh, men shouldn't have any emotions. And of course, that's not true. We're not robots. We're human beings. I think about the time my wife was giving birth to my first son and my boy came out. And it's impossible for me to think about that and not have emotions of joy and happiness, but they're well-regulated. We're gonna have a relief from anxiety, worry, and fear. And it sounds like it's part of number two, but it's so specific that it's important to talk about it. Who here has had anxiety at some point in their life? Noises, please. Yeah, yeah. Everyone's got anxiety. You don't walk up on a stage without some anxiety, even if you've been up on a stage 100 times before. But that's okay. That's okay if you have agency. Because you go, yeah, I got anxiety. No big deal. I manage it. I know how to make it happen anyway. I know how to get out here and walk and talk to people, even if I'm anxious, because I have agency. So I have a relief from the problems that are caused by anxiety, worry, and fear. You don't want to get rid of fear. You just want relief from the problems of it. Fear is a good thing. Makes you avoid doing stupid things. Immune to maladaptive persuasion. So we don't want to be immune to persuasion. If you all were immune to persuasion, there's no point in me talking to you. Because you're never going to get persuaded for anything that I'm saying. But we want to be immune to the bad persuasion, the maladaptive persuasion, that's so common in the world today. We want to be able to understand how to choose the right people to influence us. And when we realize that someone is a fraud, we want to be able to make a pivot and turn away from them. Can't do that if you're a low agency man. You're going to stick with your, you mentioned it before, hero worship. You're going to stick with your hero to the end. One of the big things is you're going to find a community of excellent men. If you're having a really difficult time finding other male friends, especially ones that you respect, it might be because they're avoiding you. That's a little painful to hear. They might be avoiding you because your agency isn't sufficient that they trust you, that they trust to be around you. You know, guys talk about stuff, that if it gets in the wrong hands, we could go to jail now in days, you know? We may not actually do the things we talk about as if they were plans, but if the wrong person overheard us or if we had a traitor in the group, man, that's destructive. So excellent men, they push low agency men out of their communities. So if you want to be in a good community, you got to have high agency. And satisfying relationships. That's not just with women. That'll be with your family. You know, that'll be with your children if you have any. You're gonna have much more satisfying relationships with people when you have control of yourself, when you have agency, when you're able to act in a way that is consistent with your own goals. Last one, you're gonna reach your potential. Whatever your potential is, however high that is, you're not gonna be able to reach it without agency. Now I created a course for people because achieving agency is something I've been thinking about since I was a child. I grew up in a very high stress family. There was fighting, there was violence, screaming, yelling, abusive speech, all this type of stuff. I grew up in a violent neighborhood. A lot of kids getting stabbed, beat up, saw a kid get his eyeball punched right out of his head once. Horrible stuff. And I had to think of a way to get through all that without going crazy or without killing myself. The only way I could get through all that was to start to learn to control myself. Now I didn't know about agency at the time. There was nobody to teach me and there was no, nothing aimed at children. Went to the library of red books on how to control your body. So I learned from Harry Houdini's biography how he used to control his breathing and his heart rate in order to stay under water for long periods of time. So I started to do that. I said, you know, I'm getting a fight and I can't control my heart rate, my breathing. The guy's gonna win. I don't have a chance. Doesn't matter if I'm about the same size as him and about the same strength. If I can't control myself, I will lose. And I started to think, you know, this same principle applies to other areas and as I learned to control my physical parts of my body, I was able to control my thinking as well because I realized that the control over the body starts with control over the mind. I've been working on this for, I'm 40. I've been working on this for like 35 years. Intensely I've been working on this since I became an adult. I've developed something to help you guys. It's a course. Normally I charge for it. I'm gonna give it free to all of you guys. There's two versions. There's the self study version. That's what I'm gonna give to you for free. And there is the guided version, which is gonna come out at the end of the month because this is hard. This is really hard. Who here has done Jordan Peterson's self-authoring? Yeah? You have to shout it out. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so a few of you have done that. I highly recommend doing that. It's not a bad idea to do it before you do this. So you have an idea where you wanna go. This will teach you how to get there. This is way harder. This is way harder. I have had clients that this has turned their whole life around and other clients that have nearly had a breakdown, have had to walk them through because they had to confront realities in their life that they had hidden. This is why I have the guided version of the program coming out at the end of the month. We're gonna be teaching groups of four to 10 men. Just come ask me for, give me your email or ask me for my email and then I'll send you this course when we get back. Any questions? So you were mentioning these programings that happen in the childhood which can influence you through your whole life. How would you go about solving them alone? Or I think the best option would be probably to get help from someone or how would you go about these things? Yeah, it depends. If we're at a stage where we are having a serious life malfunction, you know, like something's really going wrong, we need to go get help. If we're sufficiently okay that we can start working on this on our own, the course actually teaches you all the skills to reprogram yourself. That's what it's about. It's about looking at your programming, figuring out how to reprogram yourself and doing the exercises necessary to have the strength to reprogram yourself. You can't just snap your fingers and go from, you know, I believe confrontation will get me killed to man, I can make a lot more money if I'm willing to confront people and I'm way safer if I kick assholes out of my life and I should probably do that. That's a big leap. You won't just, you won't do that overnight and, you know, someone can tell you that's the truth but to internalize it, you need to change your programming. Part of the process of that is as I mentioned, getting to know yourself. You need to understand how that programming got in there and you need to, you know, if you're, I pissed off some feminists recently and I had to ban 5,000 of them that attacked my Facebook page. 100,000 views in three days. I was called a fat balding boomer several thousand times and I'm obviously not a boomer. I mean, I'm 40, I'm barely a Gen Xer. People will use insults repeatedly because they understand that hearing the same information over and over again will program people who don't have a lot of agency and they assume you don't have agency. They don't have experience with high agency people. For me, it was hilarious, I laughed at it. But for them, they thought they were actually doing me harm. Sometime in your life, it's not always a single incident but there's usually a trigger incident that really wears in a bad lesson into your mind. But it can often be the teacher who keeps telling you you're an idiot. Oh, you're stupid because you didn't finish that. Turns out all it is is you couldn't see the board because you didn't have glasses, you know? And okay, you get glasses, you realize you can see the board, it improves, but deep down inside there's that voice, that negative self-talk, repeating what your teacher said telling you you're an idiot. So we gotta get that out of you. The teacher told you're an idiot a hundred times and now you believe it. We're probably gonna have to tell you that you're smart a thousand times in order to counteract that. And we're gonna have to tell you that you're smart based on reality, objective facts. We're gonna show how intelligent you actually are. You're gonna build your ego based on reality, not based on what other people think your ego should be. Any other questions? He's gonna give you the, yeah. Yeah, this creating agency, is this the same thing like NLP, like neuro-linguistic programming? Yes, neuro-linguistic programming overlaps with the exercises that I give you. The problem is for a lot of these areas, if you wanna do it yourself, if you wanna take the course and start to reprogram yourself, or even use this information to reprogram people around you, which may or may not be ethical, I'm not suggesting you do that. If you're a parent, it's your job to program your kids, but otherwise the same subjects, the same techniques can be used. Very similar to neuro-linguistic programming, but I've simplified it enough that you don't need to understand the complexities of that in order to reprogram yourself. Otherwise you gotta learn that first, and by the time you learn that, you've forgotten what you learned it for in the first place. Any other questions? All right, so I'll tell them we have. Give it up for Noah. Thank you.